modern phenomena; we’re going to die. But we don’t always have to put up with it, do we? There are things we can – no, must – resist. This week it’s the turn of pretentious names for new construction projects.
Well, the circumstances were not favorable. It was raining, or had just rained, or was going to rain again. In any case, the sky was turning the kind of gray that makes everything below her gloomy. So that didn’t help. I was in the car and drove past a swampy site where construction was in full swing. At the edge of the site was a large sign telling what they were building here. A new neighborhood. That was not so much special; the area I drove through is in fact a large new housing estate. The name of this new housing development, on the other hand, was less Dutch than this area suggested: Hyde Park.
I’ve been to Hyde Park once when I was visiting London and had to finish some time. It is a beautiful and large park, in the middle of the city, surrounded by stately homes and inhabited by a huge number of cheeky squirrels. It has little in common with a new residential area in the polder below Schiphol, except that planes sometimes fly over it.
Hyde Park in Hoofddorp is not the only new-build neighborhood that draws inspiration from abroad. A residential complex named after the New York counterpart of Hyde Park: Central Park will soon be built in Nieuwegein. Central Park will also be the name of a new-build complex in the center of Breda (Central Park 076 is the full name, where 076 refers to the area code of Breda. It is impossible.) New York is a great source of inspiration in the real estate industry. The Amsterdam housing corporation Ymere gave the new residential area Overhoeks, which is located on the IJ, the nickname ‘Manhattan aan het IJ’. Also in Amsterdam, in the Nieuw-West district, a residential complex for students: Little Manhattan. About every high-rise building that rises in the Netherlands and stands on the water is called Manhattan. In Almere (as far as I know) you don’t have Manhattan. New Brooklyn, according to the developer a ‘beautiful, hip, green city district’. In addition to English, the gentlemen and ladies project developers now and then also speak a nice word of Français. Various types of homes are offered at the Stationskwartier in Kampen, including Voltaire and Versailles. An apartment complex on the water in Zwijndrecht is called High & L’eau. The project developer who, in 2019, transformed the Amsterdam district of Bos en Lommer into Bois et Lombre with some French stardust is still unsurpassed.
You can guess the why behind all this pretentious nonsense. Such a well-known and romantic name appeals to the imagination and gives anonymous concrete from the first moment metropolitan grandeur and allure that would make potential buyers’ mouths water. Take a piece of wasteland, call it The Tuileries and the imagination will do the rest. The actual result is always the same in the end: a sterile and soulless new housing estate with a ridiculous name. A Dutch mud barge with an exotic flag. Yes, not a single den happens here, it usually rains and the only people you see outside at night are meal delivery guys, but you do live in Brooklyn. Giving a project a name that it can never live up to happens everywhere (parents do it regularly), but it is striking how easily people in the real estate world manage to cross the (not particularly thin) line between sympathetic ambition and ridiculous pretension.
Moreover, with such a pretentious name you also deprive the real estate project in question of the possibility of growing into such an iconic phenomenon that another real estate project will later be named after it. New New Brooklyn? Won’t happen so soon. Manhattan on the Maas on the IJ on the Hudson? Doesn’t taste very good. So real estate friends, do a little more of your best please. Oh, and please stop with ‘which’ too.